I had a different internship experience this summer that truly validated my desire to be a journalist. I interned this summer at Metro in downtown New York City as a features reporter. Internship cartoon
Sure, the paper isn’t The Philadelphia Inquirer, but it’s a free daily newspaper that has a widespread distribution in NYC, Boston and Philadelphia. It taught me how a real newsroom is run, how to conduct myself as a professional reporter and several valuable skills regarding my intended field from an extremely supportive staff.
I loved the pressure of receiving five different article assignments at once and learning how to prioritize my stories and consult with publicists to conduct interviews. Although there was not a day where I did not have an article, an interview or a webpost to write up, I never found myself hating being bombarded by work, but rather loved the feeling of working hard, being productive and seeing my byline published in print.
I had the enjoyable opportunities to interview a variety of authors, travel to midtown to interview Ashanti on the red carpet, and attend a press conference with Selena Gomez and Ethan Hawke. Of course, in order to do these things, I had to commute to the city using public transportation and often had several subway trips uptown for interviews. However, as a person prone to motion and car sickness, the commute actually didn’t bother me very much, because I was getting a great experience. Yes, it was rough spending money for commute with no salary coming in and trips were boring and uncomfortable, but this was an investment worth taking for my future career. In addition, I really found value in learning how to commute and understand the subway systems to independently get around the city successfully.
I had an extremely positive experience interning this summer. I was able to look past the annoyances by really valuing the opportunities and skills it provided me, which will definitely be beneficial toward my goal of becoming a reporter — a goal that was seriously affirmed in my mind after my internship this summer.
